Electronic Medical Record as defined by HIMSS Analytics is an application environment composed of the

clinical data repository

clinical decision support

controlled medical vocabulary

computerized order entry

provider order entry

pharmacy and

clinical documentation applications

This environment supports the patient s electronic medical record across inpatient and outpatient environments, and
is used by healthcare practitioners to document, monitor, and manage health care delivery within
a care delivery organization (CDO) like a hospital / clinic / doctor’s office and imaging centers.

The data in the EMR is the legal record of what happened to the patient during their encounter at the CDO and is owned by the CDO.

If you still have confusion between EHR and EMR, please refer to this document published by HIMSS Analytics which explains the difference and does a good job.

So where is Ontario in terms of EMR implementation compared to the United States.

In most parts of the world one thing that’s common across the board for every country is that they always have a health care crisis.

My definition of crisis comes from Wikipedia’s definition of crisis and tend to take the meaning of “testing time”.

From the view, East or west, first world or third world, almost all the countries are facing some sort of health care crisis and governments, businesses, Not-for-profit organizations, individuals are all involved in working on a solution.

For example, to name a few crisis’ in brewing in coutries, here is a breif list.

In America – 46 million(about 1/6th) of the population is uninsured, with the highest spending in health-care as % of GDP(see image) and poor adoption of IT in health care.

In Canada (where I live), where its public health care, though most of the population thinks that we have the best health care the crisis is in supply of capacity and demand, efficiency of patient care, which results in a some unacceptable level of wait times for care

In India, where I grew up, the crisis is totally different as Health Insurance is not prevalent, affordable health care for Indian population is an oxymoron, big gap in health care infrastructure and the list goes on

In UK and other European nations, I would presume they are dealing with capacity and efficiency issues and its a learning curve that I have to take to understand more in detail on the health care crisis in Europe

In this blog I attempt to look at various solutions that are being proposed or worked at either by government, not-for-profit organizations or private enterprises towards continuous improvement in health care delivery across the world.